To capture the attention of shoppers, retail establishments often provide attractive and engaging sales displays that present many different inventory items in a manner designed to encourage the shoppers to purchase said items. As displays become more complex and present increased numbers and varieties of inventory items, display and inventory management and maintenance becomes increasingly complicated.
Greeting card displays often contain a large number of product locations or pockets to categorize the cards or gift objects according to the appropriate type, purpose, or function. A consumer browsing for a birthday card may select a card for examination, for example, but then may return the card to an incorrect display location if they decide not to purchase it. This may cause other cards or display items to be obscured and may prevent future shoppers from noticing the obscured items, thereby decreasing the likelihood that the obscured items will be purchased.
From the perspective of the workers who maintain or re-order inventory items for such a display, errors in stocking or maintaining the display with inventory items may occur, such as misplacement, mislabeling, failing to timely reorder an item, or prematurely ordering an already sufficiently stocked item. These errors may be compounded where inventory items are displayed in close proximity to one another, where a large number of items are displayed, or where the items are similar in overall shape and appearance and thus may easily be mistaken for other inventory items.
One source of errors that may occur while maintaining a display of multiple inventory items may arise from manually performing certain labor-intensive operations. For example, to count multiple inventory items on a display may involve an employee manually reading and recording product identifiers, such as a Universal Product Code (UPC), for each inventory item. After taking such a count, the employee may also manually determine which item categories need to be re-ordered or returned. The employee may process re-orders or returns, for example, by assembling a purchase order and mailing it to a supplier, or by placing a telephone call to the supplier.